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The image is candid: Several young women, swathed in traditional Arabic dress, stand smiling behind a deep-skinned U.S. soldier. He cradles an assault rifle as he kneels in front of them to pose for the photographer. The girl behind him, her head wrapped in a fringed lavender veil and her face touched with a gentle smile, extends her hand out over the soldier’s bleached-out army cap as if in blessing.
When Jane Forrester-Winne received e-mails from her close friend and fellow UMaine student Balkaran Samaroo, who was stationed in Iraq at the time, she counted her blessings. But when Sammy sent her this JPEG, she was especially touched.
“I realized, metaphysically, this picture is suggesting that he would live,” Forrester-Winne said. “I saw this JPEG and took hope.”
While Samaroo, whom she affectionately calls “Sammy,” was deployed as a member of the Army National Guard, both his parents died from health complications within a month of each other. Back home, Sammy’s friends waited anxiously and fearfully for his safe return from the Iraq war.
“I tried to put myself in [Sammy's] shoes, and it’s the kind of place where you walk in the room and you are facing hell,” Forrester-Winne described. “Then I started thinking about the incredible parameters surrounding this whole situation, and I thought that we could make some art out of this.”
Forrester-Winne, herself a graduate student in systems’ theory, then began the journey to compile the JPEG and e-mails she received from Sammy while he was in Iraq. The collection grew and developed into “The Sammy Project (Iraq Your Heart).” Tonight at 7:30 p.m. she will display the work, tagged as a new media and art exhibit, in the Bangor Room of Memorial Union.
Forrester-Winne feels that the strength of the piece is that it is a “very real personal experience and not just an academic exercise,” and expressed that she hoped the piece will contribute to the dialogue about the war.
“This can be an issue that is somewhat polarizing,” she said. “I want people to learn about it an exhibit that is nurturing and hopeful.”
“The Sammy Project” is no less a new media piece as well, as the technology that connected these images across the globe from places that are not yet equipped in modern development is a large part of the developing capacity of the Internet that informs us on a global level, Forrester-Winne said.
“The technology we have now for communication – new media art, programming computers to work with satellite data, the evolutions of the Internet – are all a very new part of human life on the planet,” she said. “Two generations ago this technology was in the hands of very few.”
The exhibition will begin at 7:30 p.m. in the Bangor Room, and the first 50 people who come to the event will receive a complimentary compilation CD. DJ V L Rhoda will be spinning audio and video as a part of the exhibit, and a short oral presentation and discussion will begin at 8:15 p.m.
And Sammy? He returned from Iraq safely and is now pursuing his Ph.D. in civil engineering here at the University of Maine.
